Wikia search engine set for launch

A search engine from the creators of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia will be made available to the public next week.

After months of talk, plus just a few weeks of invitation-only testing, Search Wikia will debut on Monday, 7 January.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said his goal with Wikia is to let volunteers improve search technology collectively; the way Wikipedia lets anyone add or change entries. This means anyone will be allowed to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results.

It is hoped that eventually Search Wikia will rival other search companies by making the way in which search results are arrived at more "transparent". Wales said his goal is to reduce "the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic".

However, this is unlikely to happen soon. There will be bugs and glitches to overcome, which is one reason the service has been launched to the public so soon.

In an email sent to the Search Wikia mailing list on 24 December 2007, Wales said he aims to make the initial version of the search tool available in alpha form, enabling users "to complain about what is broken."

There is also the matter of staying ahead of less scrupulous companies and spammers who try to artifically rank search results. In addition is the issue concerning the number of pages Search Wikia will initially have indexed.

Wales said the project would launch with about 50 million to 100 million web pages indexed; a fraction of the billions available with major search engines such as Google.

In the meantime, Wikipedia faces its own challenge from Google. The search engine giant has announced a project called knol, that will differ from Wikipedia by identifying who wrote each article and giving authors a chance to share in Google's advertising revenue.